I think it would be best to first contact the author, even if we are not strictly required to. Maybe he will say "I'm still editing these pages, could you wait two months before you put it in Wikipedia", and it would be very impolite to deny that request.
Generally, when adding GFDL material, we have always added a line at the bottom saying "An earlier version of this article was based on bla bla by bla bla" and a link back to the original material. See for instance [[TeX]] (which has improved quite a bit since we imported it).
Axel
Axel Boldt wrote:
Generally, when adding GFDL material, we have always added a line at the bottom saying "An earlier version of this article was based on bla bla by bla bla" and a link back to the original material.
Is this sufficient? Isn't it also the case that all future modifications must be submitted back to the original source? I'm asking because I don't know these details of FDL.
I see two different cases: Copying from an FDL source to a static web page is different from copying from an FDL source to a Wiki. In the latter case, it is so much more natural that any edits stay at the Wiki (whether this is Wikipedia to which text is copied, or another Wiki that copies information from Wikipedia, e.g. Sevilla).
(A Wiki works like a "modification magnet" or a "modification black hole", where modifications are likely to stay and not get out. Printed paper editions are the opposite: A teflon surface where no modifications stick. It is like we are beginning to understand the forces of attraction and repellation, just like static electricity 200 years ago, but this time we're discovering the natural laws for what drives people to contribute voluntary intellectual work. The Internet plays the role of Volta's battery.)
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Is this sufficient? Isn't it also the case that all future modifications must be submitted back to the original source? I'm asking because I don't know these details of FDL.
No, that's not a condition of the GFDL.
The biggest problem we currently have with incorporating material via the GFDL is that if it contains invariant sections (for example, an invariant section which amounts to a link back to the original), our end users can include that only by putting it bodily into the article, where some other person, license-unaware, may delete it at some point in the future.
Perhaps we need a way to add invariant sections for stuff incorporated from elsewhere, as a separate database field, say, one which can't be easily removed.
But we want to be careful with this. I think it would be unfortunate if individual authors here started adding invariant sections to the stuff released to the project.
--Jimbo
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